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Introduction to Linux - A Hands on Guide

This guide was created as an overview of the Linux Operating System, geared toward new users as an exploration tour and getting started guide, with exercises at the end of each chapter.
For more advanced trainees it can be a desktop reference, and a collection of the base knowledge needed to proceed with system and network administration. This book contains many real life examples derived from the author's experience as a Linux system and network administrator, trainer and consultant. They hope these examples will help you to get a better understanding of the Linux system and that you feel encouraged to try out things on your own.

I've been using Mandrake for 3 years now that makes somewhat biased. A made a netinstall which worked flawlessly although it took some time to download all the 3.0 Gb of apps i wanted.

First I made update install, which worked to some extend - my Nvidia drivers didn't worker after the reboot but after a short nv->nvidia in the xorg.conf file I was back in gui. KDE 3.3 is really faster than 3.2 and the new loginmanager gdm (mandrake skinned) was very sleek. I soon found out that due some changes in the way hardware was detected i had other problems and couldn't cinstall nvida drivers again since mdk though i had installed kernel headers but those must have been for the mdk 10.1 kernel.

All in all i made a new install (again keeping /home) and now it all seems great. All my hardware was found and worked as a charm (it also did in 10.1). It feels very new - all my favorit apps have been updated and kile, kontact, kpdf juk are very sleek.

Easy install like all the other Mandrake versions (I had to do it thru ftp, no cd installs.)

Cons:

Nothing in particular. Limited in available librairies.

Overall is very nice. It runs de KDE 3.3 and Gnome 2.8 due to bugs in KDE 3.4 and Gnome 2.10.

Very easy to use. Great for beginners to intermediate user. Very secure Apache servers available 1.x and 2.x for you server freaks. Samba shares browsing thru the gui is really nice.

I'm running a T40 IBM laptop and only have one common problem which is for just about everyone running ANY Linux distro. Very lousy ATI Radeon drivers. My card does well over 1000 fps on glxgears, but the animation is very choppy.

My card is a Ati Radeon 7500 Mobility L7. Mandrake 10.0 had better drivers. I know upgrading from 10.0 to 10.1 keeps graphics nice, compared to only installing 10.1. I wasn't able to upgrade 10.0 to this Limited Edition.

But a clean install works like a charm. Took about 1 hour over heanet.ie over my 3Mbit connection.

Would you recommend the product? no | Price you paid?: D/L | Rating: 7

Pros:

More stable than previous issues?

Cons:

Daffy Duck on LSD!!! (Logo) Not the most user friendly any more.

A while ago, I would have rated this distro more highly, and recommended it, maybe scoring 8 or 9.

So what has changed? Not enough, in my view. I cut my Linux teeth on Mandrake, 9.0 (urpmi broke on update), 9.1 (brilliant), and 9.2 (also brilliant).

But whilst version numbers have moved on, and kernels are newer, the distro itself has remained static. You still have to type in all your software choices by hand. If you mess up you have to do it again. I know you can save them to a floppy, but I don't have a floppy and increasingly computers come without floppies. Why not allow you to save to a file on an unaffected partition, or on a USB key, or something?

The other thing is that you are presented with a list of programs whose names are meaningless. When I first used Mandrake, it was worth making multiple installs until you got it right, because it was still the most user-friendly out there.

Mandrake's appeal to me was always user friendliness, but I'm afraid the bar has been raised. I recently tried this distro because it was a free coverdisk, and whilst other distros have become friendlier, Mandriva has stood still. The other reason I tried it was because my PCLinuxOS partition had been b0rked and it was there so I thought I'd have a look. Frankly I couldn't wait to get PCLOS back.

One of the things I noticed is that KPackage is not included, not even on the DVD version. So this meant I had to use the command line to install the RPMs of OpenOffice 2-beta. Sorry, but rpm from the command line is a pain in the ar5e!

PCLOS forked from Mandrake 9.2. It has continued to develop user friendliness. It installs a default set of software, which is very well selected, but has repositories from which you can add/subtract/update. It uses apt for rpm, which means you get the easier-to-operate synaptic for updates. It includes a lot of the media stuff you had to get from PLF as standard.

MEPIS has also moved the same way, but is Debian-based. As I said, the "user-friendliness" bar has been raised, that's how we're gonna get people to switch, and what was good enough in 2003 is not good enough any more.

I'm giving it 7/10 because it's not bad, it's just that you can do better these days, so I cannot recommend it!

I was impressed. I run it on a dell inspirion laptop. I noticed the wireless support was a lot better than it had been. I have 4 wireless cards and I was able to get 3 out of 4 working no problem. The last one is one that doesn't work good with any distros. Mandrake has ndiswrapper on it. You have to install it but once you do it works great.Very easy to set up my dell1350 card and my netgeat wg311t. I have an orinoco card and it found it right off the bat. Very much improved.
Linux and wireless has been a real nightmare but this last distro is much better.

The installation gives you an option to read all three install disks so you don't have load them up later. It's a good idea but doesn't really save you much time.

I'm a newbie but in a short time I was able to get dvd working/ Opera web browser installed/limewire/real player (that should be included in the install)/Ogle dvd/Mplayer.

I dual boot and I have been staying so much lately in Mandrake I took XP off.

Now, I'm 100% on Linux.
I'm just starting to see how to get things working. Thank goodness that Mandrake uses RPM to help install the programs. That is a big help.

PS. If you want a distro that is good with wireless I found Mephis worked great! It was better with wireless than Mandrake but harder for me to work with overall......

Considering I am a a newbee,this distro works very well
Up on the net very quickly,Suprised at the devices that
auto configed.So well.Wireless even worked On Laptop
compaq. e-500;Different than windows but having a Blast Wont need my dual boot much longer.Good by
Windows!!!!!

I have tried most all versions of mandrake since 8.0 and only since 9.0 did I begin to really play around with different distros.
I have to download software from the local community college because im on 56k. I had problems getting rpmdrake (I guess that's what its called now), working with my downloaded repositories. Although after setting up the repositories from easy urpmi, I installed most everything I needed as usual. I'm using the multimedia kernel from thac's with Nvidia drivers from their site.

I haven't updated my system, it is bone stock other than plf, and contrib stuff. So the aforementioned bug may not be present.

I like PCLOS as well, and Im gonna write a review for it. Mandrake does what I need it to. Plenty of Software to chose from thats easy to install, and all the development packages are on the cd's in case you need to compile something. The only downside to mandrake is that you have to setup java install a few codecs. No biggie even for a newbie assuming he takes a few minutes to google before his install to do a teeny bit of research on his hardware. Mine was all detected fine by the way.

Oh, speaking of hardware, I have a P3-733 GF2 GTS 32mb 80gb 7200rpm seagate, sblive value, and yes a conexant modem. I went ahead and bought a license from linuxant because the drivers work so well in any distro I try as long as I have the kernel source. Even with transparent menu's and the liquid style engine on KDE, my box is still pretty fast.

I was using happily the Mandrake 10.1, with some issues about USB key. Furthermore, I wished KDE 3.3 with newer digikam and Quanta+ apps.

So, I downloaded the 4 CDs (as standard member of the club) and made a clean install, excluding /home. All went OK and seamless. The USB key worked now very fine in my Athlon XP 2GHz. As seems a smart decision, Firefox + Thunderbird (+nvu) replaced Mozilla. So I had not to do further reinstall from FF & TB rpms. The new menu schemes means some changes, but I hope that in next future it will be standard everywhere.

After 1 month working with MDV 2005 LE, I think that this was a smart decision. No big changes, as one can hope after the Connectiva merger, with 2006 Edition.

Two issues: the first one, the ugliest bootsplash and background that I never sow in a distro. The time spared due to not having to install FF & TB, was spent getting rid of this dumb penguin (sure, he is not Tux!).

The second, when installing (successfully, btw) 2005 LE in my office, I swept off the remains of an old Win98, repartitioning the disk. The new user installed had an ID of 500 instead the usual 501 for the first user; so I had to make some changes in order to recover the correct permissions. This was a bug or a new tendency?

Would you recommend the product? no | Price you paid?: D/L | Rating: 3

Pros:

Nothing over Mandrake 10.0

Cons:

Very slow compared to 10.0

As a Mandrake user from versoin 8.1, always very impressed with how easy it is to install and run, I decided to upgrade all because of Kopete not logging on to MSN server, and its upgrade being beyond my patience to install, due all the damned dependencies needed.

So, armed with the DVD download, I installed 10.2. What do you get? Well the new KDE looks a bit prettier than the older one. However, it's so slow on my 900MHz Celeron (with 512M RAM) I had to do a "Windows XP" and disable the fancy graphics to speed it up to a manageable speed. No more fancier graphics.

This doesn't help with Thunderbird, Open Office, Mozilla etc which are slow to the point of making the mouse jerky.

My software IDEs wouldn't install as they were looking for older version of some libraries.

All in all, for me, a complete waste of time. One week later I've gone back to 10.0 which is far faster and the only thing I'm missing is not logging on to MSN.

My advice for those with 10.0 - stick with it. For those with versions older than 10.0 - just dlwonlaod and install 10.0, it's better basically.

Easy setup for a novice on most systems. Great online support. Great looking product!

Cons:

Hard to get xorg.conf configured properly with my HDTV. This would occur with any distro, however.

I only ended up with Mandriva because the bandwidth for the download of the free distro was so great. I am glad I have it now, though. Well packaged with all the rpms you will need, and other rpms for Mandrake/Mandriva are readily available.

Would you recommend the product? no | Price you paid?: D/L | Rating: 4

Pros:

Easy to use, easy to install, great hardware detection

Cons:

The free version is severely limited, in my opinion

I started using Mandrake as a Linux newbie. I was impressed with how easy it was to use and to install. I was also impressed with the ease that it recognized my hardware.

As I got more familiar with Linux I found Mandrake to be limited and buggy.

I've slowly come to the realization that if you want to really use Mandrake/Mandriva to it's fullest you need to belong to Mandrake Club. That's not something I want to do.

I switched to Fedora Core 4 and am loving it. I find it almost as easy to use as Mandr* and really enjoy that I have access to all of the distribution.

I owe the Mandr* team thanks for helping me realilze that I could use Linux on a full-time basis as a newbie. (That's why I gave this distro a 4 instead of a 2.) But as I progressed in my knowledge I needed to move on.

I've been using Mandrake since v7. So when I decided recently to replace my win2000 domain with a linux samba domain, mandrake was my first choice. I grabbed the latest version LE 2005 and went to work. Got everything working as far as networking is concerned, however, I had some dissapointments and some flat out problems.
Problems first. I have not been able to do a blasted thing with my UPS under this distro. I've spent hours on this. It say's it recognizes it, but that's about where it stops. I also have problems with tape drive recognition, which works fine under older releases. Without proper UPS and backup support for the network, LE 2005 just aint gonna cut it for me.
Then there's the dissappointments. Another user talked about how great a distro this was... about 3 or 4 years ago. I have to concur with their assessement. There has been little change in this distro other than package updates to newer versions. When you compare this install process to others out there, it's not necessarily the easiest or best anymore.
Long story short, I'm experimenting with other distros out there. From the install I just did of SUSE 9.3, I can't see comming back to mandrake anytime soon.

This is a very user friendly and stable distribution. It comes with a newer version of KDE and I haven't had any problems with it whatsoever. I am having some issues installing my win32 codecs. It also comes with a load of extra applications ranging from Firefox, to OpenOffice, to The GIMP, even an alarm clock program and an e-mail client. It doesn't come with java or flash player by default so you have to install those yourself, but that isn't a hard thing to do. Overall, a very stable and easy to use distro with lots of good applications and features.

I have been loyal to Fedora for a long time. And now,
I think it is time for some changes.
My friend talk a lot about Mandrake so I decide to install it.

When I installed it, I feel a little upset because it asked me too
much things while Fedora installer was so easy. The only good
aspects is the ability to copy all install disk to hard drive. But
the package choose was so annoy. I want to install all things (so that I can try all mandrake's best things). However, there
is no options to do so, I had to check all the options one by one, what a waste of time?.

When it start, It showed me an ugly login screen and an ugly wallpaper. Why root cannot have a good wallpaper instead an ugly red screen?
All of my favourite software has dissapear, where is kdevelop, where is thunderbird.
I don't like the way it organize its main menu. I have to dive into so many sub menu and so sometimes I forget where the items was.
I had been seeking for almost seven days to findout the way to make a dialup connection (kppp was absents, either pppd or gnomeppp). But when I dial to my ISP, mandriva said that my computer seem to be not connected? What happened, it didn't show me. It 'd just said that and disconnect.
When I use kppp, which was installed after I make a connection in mandriva control center, I can held the connection but I can not access the internet. ping said that the network is unreachable.
The multimedia program was good configed, however, it still could not player wm* file types. In fedora, I use mplayer with all the codecs to handle these file. Although mplayer is included in mandriva, it still cannot handle these file even when I have made a symlink from the mplayer codecs folder in fedora to the mandriva's one.
The mandrake looks great first but it help you nothing. It run too slowly, it require root password to change just the display resolution. And the worst things is that it destroy FC4 init ramdisk while I check the options to display a grphical screen at boot time. I have to reinstall FC4 to fix that. Terrible.

I don't recommend this distro to any one. But I prefer Fedora to this distro.
PS: I have delete this distro.!

rpm support, stable, tons of software options, can copy installation cds to hard drive to avoid hunting them down later, it's Linux!, updated versions of software included with Mandrake 10.1, graphical installer, handy firewall, is very good for beginning

Cons:

is a pain to pick and choose your software on install

I know I have reviewed this product once but now that I've become fairly a fairly apt Linux user and have learned my way around this distro I decided it was time to update. First off, the graphical installer is a plus, although it is kind of a pain to pick all of your software if you decided to pick and choose all of it. Wish it looked like the software manager that is available after you finish installing so that you could type in a keyword and just find what you wanted that way. The new version of KDE is a plus too, a little more stable. If you are a techy user though I would use Gnome, it's more the most stable and has a few little addons that KDE doesn't have. Also during installation you have the option to copy the installation cds to your hard drive so that the setup will continue without them, plus any software installations that you do later that would need the cds now doesn't, so that will save you a lot of time digging through your drawers for the cd labeled (mandriva linux cd 2). The update manger makes it easy to locate updates for your software too. The software manager makes it very easy to search for and install software, even if it wasn't on the cds you can use the software manager to download and install it. It comes with a buttload of software including firefox, thunderbird, mplayer and a few others. I would recommend using mplayer over kaffeine because I had the time of my life struggling with kaffeine before I discovered mplayer, which I have found and installed all of the codecs so that it plays .wmv files and the whole works. The fact that it supports rpm installation media makes it very easy to install software that comes packaged as an rpm. It's also very easy to customize the look and feel of your desktop, including all of the sound effects. However, with all of this user friendliness you still have all the security of any other linux os including a built in firewall, the root permission rules, access to the good old linux command line via konsole or Rxvt, etc. However I am having some issues with zsnes, and it does tend to yell at me sometimes when I try to run kbear, lol. Overall, I give this distro a 9 out of 10 because although I know there is room for improvement, I can't see any, haha.

The install was a breeze as it is with most GUI linux installs. The partitioning tool is one of the best I've seen in a linux distro, very clear about which partitions exist which types of filesystems exists on them. This makes it very easy to avoid accidentally erasing valuable data during an install or upgrade.

On the flipside (yes that boot penguin is disgusting) my creative soundcard fails to work in only this distro. (I've got it working in SUSE, GENTOO, Red Hat, Arch Linux, and even Mandrake 9.1) So I think that the "Mandriva" team must have screwed something up with the "emuk10" drivers.

I would recommend skipping this distro and wait for a more polished version of Mandrake/Mandriva linux. Or use OpenSUSE.